Birds, Wind Turbines & Nuclear Power
How many birds should we slaughter in the name of saving the planet?
How many birds should we slaughter in the name of saving the planet?
(ANTIMEDIA) — The elephant in the room of the blockchain industry is energy usage. Financial pundits love to compare its intake to national consumption. For example, earlier this year Forbes pointed out that Bitcoin’s proof of work mechanism uses the same amount of electricity in a year as the entire nation of Switzerland. Ars Technica compared Bitcoin usage to the nation […]
China will account for more than one-third of the world’s use of renewable energy by 2040 [By Kenueone [CC0 or CC0], via Wikimedia Commons]
With the US opting out of the Paris Accords on Climate Change, many have turned their focus to China to spearhead efforts to curb green house emissions and move from fossil fuel to renewable energy.
The potential for growth in the latter in China is usge says a British Petroleum Energy Outlook report for 2018.
It’s no secret China has been installing solar panels at a record-breaking rate — it’s been happening for years now.
But in 2017 China took its solar drive even further, deploying more PV capacity in one year than any other country has — or at least had at end of 2016.
Last week, Bloomberg New Energy Finance revised upwards its projection for new solar capacity in China, taking it from the pretty impressive 30GW it forecast in July to a gargantuan 54GW.
After Hurricane Irma in Florida, millions have been without electricity. But those Floridians who had solar panels plus an inverter or a Tesla powerwall were able to recover electricity immediately. Likewise, cities used solar to power traffic lights and other essential services after the huge storm had blown past.
Energy from offshore wind just got a lot cheaper. The cost of subsidies for new offshore wind farms has halved to £57.50 per megawatt hour (MWh) since the last government auction in 2015, after two developers – Denmark’s Dong Energy and Spain’s EDP – bid aggressively for subsidy contracts to build new farms in 2022-23.
The results of the auction shocked industry analysts, who had expected prices to be around the £70-80 mark.
China has more than doubled its end-of-decade solar power target, with new installations dramatically outstripping expectation, according to the government’s energy agency.
By the end of July this year, China’s solar PV capacity topped 112GW, after installing a stunning 35GW in just seven months — more than twice as much as installed by any other country in all of 2016.
As a result, total solar PV capacity now exceeds the government’s 2020 goal of 105GW, set as recently as last year.
China is fast becoming the world leader in green energy production and in the innovation of technologies to more effectively harness green energy.
One of the keys to understanding China’s green revolution lies in China’s ability to quickly produce large quantities of modern green technologies, thus making these technologies cheaper, more abundant and more efficient to install than those in other countries.
National Geographic reports,
Contractors work on Europe’s biggest floating solar panel array on the Queen Elizabeth II Reservoir near Walton-on-Thames in south west London, Monday, March 21, 2016. (AP/Matt Dunham)
Wind, solar and energy efficiency have replaced the vast majority of power previously provided by the UK’s coal fleet, a new analysis shows.